Children’s books for explaining emotions!
Talking about feelings is more comfortable when stories start the conversation. These children’s books explain emotions gently and provide a natural transition into discussions about self-acceptance, empathy, kindness, love and friendship. I hope you enjoy them as much as we have.
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Lots of Feelings is a great book to introduce the concept of emotions to young children. With close-up photos of real kids expressing a wide variety of feelings. The focus is solely on the emotion itself because of the absence of the ‘the story’ causing the emotion. This can therefore be, (and is) any child’s story. |
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My Many Colored Days uses colors and animals to represent the different emotions. On feel-good days, readers meet an active, happy red horse, and an energetic yellow bee. A lumbering brown bear brings hibernation to mind. Great story to tie into an art project! |
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In My Heart takes young readers through a full range of emotions and the physical feelings that accompany them. This is a great book for very young (toddler to pre-K) children, as it models simple language that can be easily mimicked. It allows young children to identify and express their emotions with simple language or picture pointing. |
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Everyone reinforces a belief I have been teaching my own kids and my students for decades – that all of us are more alike than many of us ever realize. Everyone has feelings. Everyone has times when they feel bored, sad, unheard. But everyone also has times when they can laugh, sing and be happy, too. We’re all in this together. Every single one of us. |
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The Way I Feel is an engaging, rhyming story about a very wide range of emotions. This story does a wonderful job of giving the audience the language for those feelings, especially the less-spoken of ones: proud, bored, jealous etc., providing context for situations where they may arise. The illustrations are very entertaining! |
I hope you enjoyed this list and find it helpful in choosing stories for explaining feelings to kids! Looking for storybook lessons with models of kids managing specific tricky feelings? Please visit my Dealing-With-Feelings (#DWF) page. The #DWF stories are not social stories or scripts, but more of a mid-point between the picture books (like those above) and true social stories.
I am an Amazon Associate, and do earn a small commission from qualifying purchases that help support this site. I have included links below for those would like to purchase these or any related titles. I also included a couple of titles related to the pandemic. Please read my disclosure policy here.
Do you have favorite feelings / emotions stories to suggest for a future post? Please include them in the comments!
Best wishes, my friends. Stay safe and well.
P.S.
Is your school reorganizing? Here’s how we helped prepare our kindergarten students for the transition from the online class they came to know with us to the hybrid model through their home schools during the pandemic.
FREE RESOURCE:
For students struggling with loneliness, this free Dealing-With-Feelings storybook lesson can be downloaded my TpT store by clicking here. Your feedback is greatly appreciated!
Best wishes to you and your loved ones,
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